Remembering David Broder, Washington’s Gentle, Generous Dean

It is not too much to say that the death of *The Washington Post’*s David Broder—at 81, after a long battle with diabetes—means the end of an era in political journalism and, in a larger sense, in American life. That is a cliché that David—with his passionate centrism, meticulous attention to detail, endless patience for probing the subtleties of public opinion, and determination to popularize the findings of scholarly political scientists—would undoubtedly have deplored as hype. But it seems the only reasonable thing to say all the same.For more than 40 years, David was the gold standard for what used to be known—without irony, before Roger Ailes turned the phrase into a cynical slogan—as fair and balanced reporting. Because of his singular reputation, The Post vouchsafed him something almost no one else in his trade (with the possible exception of James Reston) ever got: both an Op-Ed column, in which he could express opinion, and pride of place as the paper’s most important “straight” political writer on Page One. Even he occasionally had trouble straddling that divide, as when he used his column to defend Congressman Dan Rostenkowski from what he thought were trumped-up ethics charges and *The Post’*s editors henceforth barred him from writing about Rosty in the news pages.

*The Post’*s obituary reports that David regularly logged 100,000 miles a year in pursuit of county chairmen and governors and pollsters and professors and—as often as not—the people who actually vote and make the difference in elections. He routinely ran rings around younger reporters, to whom he was unfailingly generous. I well remember inviting him to dinner at a super-trendy restaurant in Los Angeles more than a decade ago, when David was about 70, and I worried because the food was taking so long to come that I assumed he’d be exhausted. At evening’s end, he just said, “I’m sorry they rushed us so.”

He worked hard to keep abreast of the times. I recall a column he wrote in the 1990s upon seeing Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Angels in America (or was it the sequel?), reflecting movingly on the meaning of the gay rights revolution, with a sensitivity rare for someone of his generation. In a milieu filled with pompous blowhards, he was without pretense. A couple of years ago, as we were leaving a taping of Washington Week in Review together in a sudden rainstorm, I found that my car service was waiting at the door, while his had yet to appear. Without an umbrella, he nevertheless refused my offer to jump ahead, though he outranked me, in every sense of the word.

If some of David’s most recent work did not always seem his best, it may be because his basic decency—and the very sense of fairness that was the hallmark of his career—made him deal too kindly with some modern political charlatans unworthy of his charity. His unwavering belief that reasonable people could and should work together sometimes led him to conclude, erroneously, that they would. Such shortcomings cannot diminish his singular achievement, which was to remember—always—that politics matters because it is about real people, who are living and dying and getting and losing. David’s life’s work was explaining how, and why, that was so.

It strikes me as especially poignant that David died on the eve of the annual dinner of the Gridiron Club, in whose revels he played a part for nearly 40 years, and whose music committee he’d continued to serve as “senior adviser.” David saw the Gridiron as the acme of civility and good-fellowship in a world where both were in increasingly short supply. When it comes to skewering politicians, the club’s motto is that the Gridiron may singe, but it never burns. The same might be said of David’s approach to journalism. Like the parent who seldom resorts to spanking, he knew that the lash is not half as devastating as a sober expression of disappointment.